In 2009, 50.7 million people were uninsured (without health insurance) in the United States of America, or roughly 1 in 6 residents. Of this number, those under the age of 35 were the most affected; 30 percent of all 18-34 year-olds went without insurance. On the opposite end of the generation spectrum, only 2 percent of residents over the age of 65 went without insurance, thanks to the publicly supported Medicare program. Here, the estimated number of uninsured is displayed by age, from left to right.

Source: Artist's calculations based on 2010 Current Population Survey.

Using a computer programming language called Processing, my work abstracts the data that surrounds humanity and contextualizes numerical-driven meaning in aesthetic form.

With information and numbers abound, our existence both depends on data and transcends their meaning. I explore the boundaries of analytical and emotional reaction to data and art. Can ‘just another statistic’ become something that informs us in a visceral and elegant manner? Or conversely, can an abstracted image hanging on the wall help to explain some of today’s most pressing social challenges?

In this way my work reflects our development as a society and its implications to the way we live.

Randomness is a central element to these works. While social and technological advances allow us to exert increasing levels of control over our life, much of life’s outcomes are still whim to the fortunes of chance. For this reason, many elements of the data being portrayed - the tilt of a line, the glow of an orb, the hue of a shadow - are left to the whims of electrons inside a computer processor.

And yet these aesthetic, abstracted meanings – e.g. the data, computer code, and artistic discretion that produced these works -- remind us that we can still exert much influence over our human experience.